This material was originally published as the Murals and Mosaics newsletter on Oct. 27, 2023. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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Public Enemy is a rap group “whose dense, layered sound and radical political message made them,” by one account, “among the most popular, controversial and influential hip-hop artists of the late 1980s and early ‘90s.”
The Humboldt Park artist who goes by Stef Skills says she “listened to them as a teenager and they baptized me into hip-hop music and culture.”
With their lyrics and themes taking on such important topics as racism and oppression, and pushing back against authority and the media, Public Enemy also helped instill in her “the spirit of activism and being able to question things that I’ve been taught,” she says.
That’s “carried over to all aspects of my life, beyond hip-hop or music,” Stef Skills says. “I think that’s something Public Enemy gave to a lot of people.”
Now, she’s giving something back to them, in the form of a mural on the Southeast Side, on a viaduct wall under the Chicago Skyway on Commercial Avenue not far from 93rd Street.
She painted it in September — not long after seeing Public Enemy perform in the Bronx as part of a celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — for an annual graffiti art event called ”Meeting of Styles.”
“Seeing them perform,” and knowing “how relevant ... their songs are still, it made me want to do a tribute,” she says.
The mural includes ”elements of their music video” for the popular song “Fight the Power.”
It’s also a re-imagination of Public Enemy’s album cover for the 1988 release “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” featuring the members of the group, Chuck D and Flavor Flav, behind bars.
In Stef Skills’ painting, the duo have broken free, and barbed wire is behind them.
Flavor Flav is wearing his clock necklace as usual, but he’s portrayed as a cat, painted by Stef Skills’ artist-friend Lily Cursed, who lives in Mexico City but recently was in town.
The cat is one of her signature characters, as is the woman Stef Skills painted in Chuck D’s place, with her name reflected in the sunglasses.
“It’s a tribute to them but also a lady and her cat,” she says. “It’s also the idea of the thrown away woman, after a certain age you’re thrown away ... or a spinster. But no, we’re powerful, too ... just a woman and her cat, that’s fine, they’re happy.”
“It’s kind of like a tip of the hat to womanism,” Stef Skills says. “We’re here to ‘fight the power,’ too ... for the Black struggle, for the immigrant struggle, all the struggles.”
This painting is the focus of this week’s Chicago Sun-Times ”Murals and Mosaics” story. Please click here to read more.
The Chicago Bulls are back in action on the court, and the team commissioned several new murals to coincide with the new season.
Artist Kate Lewis, who did the artwork shown above, says, ”They gave us a list of themes we could choose from and I chose ’future,’ so every vignette in my mural is responding to that theme of future.”
“So that little boy is growing up into a full-grown Bulls player.”
The basketballs are “rolling forward.”
The bull is charging ahead.
And so on.
The piece is 39 feet tall and 72 feet long, says Lewis, who splits her time between Chicago and Florida.
Lewis says several artists assisted her with the mural, located in the West Loop at 180 N. Jefferson St.: Garrett Foreman, Jeff Pak and Mack Constantine. The project was curated by Muros.
Two other Bulls murals (at 1601 W. Chicago Ave. and 1856 S. Ashland Ave.) were done, respectively, by artists Max Sansing and FEDZ, both of whom we’ve written about previously.
Last year we wrote about other murals done by Lewis along the Chicago River. See below for a visual.
It feels like the West Side has been getting a little more love lately from artists.
We’ve noticed, and written about, several significant murals created there over the last year or so.
There’s an older piece, though, that we photographed recently on the West Side and wanted to highlight.
Located on a railroad retaining wall along Lake Street near Central Avenue, and across from Austin Town Hall Park, the lead artists were Ivan B. Watkins and Yusef E. Brown.
We caught up with Watkins, who lived in Chicago for a long time but now is back in his hometown of New Orleans. He says the piece, titled ”Reflections on Arrival,” was done in 1999 and is about the growth and evolution of Chicago, “but looking specifically at the West Side and the African American community.”
The characters shown above represent the “progression from wood and brick to steel,” Watkins says. “It represents the worker, the laborers, the workforce, the people that uphold the infrastructure, that build the infrastructure.”
Below, we see images of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, regarded as Chicago’s first settler, and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa.
The painting also “shows the migration of African Americans from the South, going from rural to urban,” Watkins says.
There’s a giant rose “bursting from concrete” that’s supposed to represent “rebirth, renewal, revitalization, and just beauty out of even the most urban environment.”
There’s a pretty interesting sculpture park in Skokie along McCormick Boulevard, and below you’ll see just one of the pieces of art that’s there.
Students at Niles West High School ”created the colorful glazed clay forms that ... were assembled onto lengths of PVC pipe, embedded in concrete. Students were free to use their imagination in creating these beautiful organic sculptural forms.”
Click on the map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals
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Robert Herguth, Sun-Times
